March 2016

Hello everyone. I’ve had a bad knee for the last ten days so I haven’t been doing any cardiovascular work, be it exercise bike or running. I had been planning to extol the virtues of my exercise bike but as I’ve only been doing weights for the last fortnight I’ll save that for another day.
The mini hiatus from cardiovascular has allowed me to focus on weights and I have to say I’ve really got into it, a real taste for lifting weights has developed. Following on from the advice from the boys at Insentif, their blog post, http://www.insentif.co.uk/good-technique-vs-maximum-weight and following advice through my virtual personal fitness trainer Richard we set out this plan:

Just to recap I do:

25 lat dips using my dip station

10 heavy bicep curls immediately followed by 10 lighter bicep curls,

10 press ups,

10 shoulder presses with heavy weights immediately followed by 10 shoulder presses with the lighter weights

and finally as many pull up/knee raises as I can muster, normally 5.

This takes 10 minutes. I like to time this unit of weights because it stops me cooling off and keeps the pace going and also stops me caning it for the first 20 or 30 minutes thereby tiring early and making a longer session less likely. I’ve regularly put together 1 hour 20 minute sessions this past fortnight with 3 days on one day off. You have to have a day off to allow your muscles the chance to regenerate.

The equipment I use:

Olympic workbench

The Dip/Chin Station

Free weights for bicep curls

The way I go about my session is to tell myself it’s alright to do a small session , just 20 or 30 minutes. This makes the start smaller in my mind and once I get the session going it invariably goes on longer. I commonly do 6 units of my routine as outlined above which takes 1 hour. Then I do “extras” by way of gravy atop the main course. For me this means focusing on bicep curls and press ups and I simply keep going until I get tired. This adds about 20 minutes to my total workout. I do all this at home. One nice tip I would give is to have some kind of fan arrangement. It cools you down which makes you more comfortable and therefore more inclined to keep on rocking.

I’m really looking forward to adding some cardiovascular to my new found love of weights once my knee gets better. It should thicken out my training sessions quite a bit. Stay tuned for my next blog which will include my monthly weigh in. I daresay the excitement is overwhelming.